“I can’t imagine being without it now.” UHD on the Stroke Rehab Times

The third part of our three-part series with Dr Louise Johnson and Karen Smith from University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust is now available to read on the Stroke Rehab Times.

Click here to read part three: “Walking towards the future of stroke rehabilitation.”

“I can’t imagine being without it now. You can’t imagine going back to what you did before, but you don’t know that until you’ve had the opportunity to use it.”

In this series, we reflected with University Hospitals Dorset NHS Charity about how – and why – they ran an award-winning fundraising campaign to purchase a Hocoma Lokomat electromechanical gait trainer for the Acute Stroke Unit.

“The way the Lokomat really helps with training of physiological gait is that we’re improving people’s patterns of walking. There are other added benefits too. The Lokomat enables patients to exercise and help with their cardiovascular fitness, because if you’re immobile it’s difficult to exercise outside of the Lokomat.”

The charity recently celebrated the one year anniversary since the Lokomat was installed, and we caught up with the two people instrumental at making this happen to find out the impact this equipment is making to patients’ lives.

“It gives people the motivation to do more in the rest of their rehab as well. It gives people hope to carry on, because rehab is hard work. You have a stroke and it’s devastating, and you really have to work hard at getting better.”

Thank you so much to Dr Louise Johnson and Karen Smith for creating this series of articles with us!

Part 1 👉 http://bit.ly/3SGsuPe

Part 2 👉 http://bit.ly/3SFEwZ4

Part 3 👉 http://bit.ly/3J5QZSM

About the Lokomat

The Lokomat is a robotic-assisted therapy device for highly intensive physiological gait rehabilitation for severely impaired patients.

The Lokomat uses an individually adjustable exoskeleton combined with dynamic body weight support, with adjustable hip and knee joint angles to tailor the device to a patient’s specific needs during training. Customisable and versatile, the Lokomat can train a wide range of patients to develop a healthy physiological gait pattern – even those with severe disabilities.

The Lokomat allows therapists to focus on delivering high-quality therapy for patients, rather than be limited by the strain of traditional gait therapy. It enhances staff efficiency and safety, which leads to higher training intensity, more treatments per therapist, and consistent, superior patient care.

The Lokomat was developed by Swiss rehabilitation technology company Hocoma, and is supplied in the UK by Summit Medical and Scientific.

Contact us

Get in touch with Summit Medical and Scientific today to find out more about incorporating state-of-the-art rehabilitation technology into your practice. Contact us via email at info@summitmedsci.co.uk or call 01372 3459863.

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